Weekend/ ARTS & MORE: Letting someone disappear is hard to do

Closure, the idea of bringing something consequential to a satisfying end, is usually mentioned in the context of a tragedy. Victims of physical or emotional violence, for instance, seek closure in order to move past their traumatic experiences. The dramatic premise of "Away From Her," the first movie directed by the gifted young Canadian actress Sarah Polley, is that closure is sometimes impossible to achieve.

The tragedy in this case is Alzheimer's disease. "I think I'm beginning to disappear," says Fiona (Julie Christie), an attractive woman who in late middle age is still fit enough for cross-country skiing in the forests surrounding the beautiful lakeside home she occupies with her retired literature professor husband, Grant (Gordon Pinsent).

Fiona knows her forgetfulness is getting worse, but when she's diagnosed with the brain-wasting disease, it is Grant who goes into denial. The more he professes that he will never have Fiona institutionalized, the less convincing he sounds.

Grant's attitude may have more to do with guilt than with his abiding and very genuine love for the woman he married when she was barely out of her teens. Bits of conversation and artfully inserted flashbacks imply a past indiscretion on his part that almost destroyed their marriage. Grant believed Fiona had moved past it, but had she really?

Fiona takes charge of her own fadeout, demanding Grant put her in a nursing home when the time comes. This directive becomes more final when the facility's administrator (Wendy Crewson) tells Grant that their rules for Alzheimer's patients prohibit any visitors for the first month. When he returns four weeks later for his first visit, Fiona has not only virtually forgotten him, she has taken up with another male patient, a catatonic invalid named Aubrey (Michael Murphy).

Grant comes every day in the hope that Fiona will remember him, but she treats him more like an unwelcome suitor and Aubrey more like a husband. "He doesn't confuse me," she says in what may or may not be a lucid moment. When Grant's constant neediness becomes a burden on Kristy (Kristen Thomson), one of the nurses, she accuses him of taking Fiona's deteriorating condition personally, as if her Alzheimer's were a rebuke, a way of getting back at him for his infidelity.

Julie Christie, whose performance here was nominated for an Oscar, dominates the movie but it is Grant's story, and Pinsent has the more difficult task, since he is called upon to show what a man must give up to change.

Polley's adaptation of Alice Munro's story is a bit stiff, especially the dialogue, but her direction is perfectly calibrated to the idiosyncrasies of Munro's fully formed characters. This is a story about how people interact under emotional duress. If as a character Grant is not entirely sympathetic, he is at least comprehensible. When Aubrey's wife (Olympia Dukakis) removes her husband from the home because she can't afford it, Grant asks her to reconsider because Fiona is bereft without him.

The contrast between the worldly Grant and this down-to-earth woman with limited means is obvious, but they connect through a desire for something that transcends their respective backgrounds. Denied closure in his relationship with Fiona, Grant finally learns how to be selfless. Letting go is exactly that hard.(IHT/Asahi: May 30,2008)